XP very slow
-
Re: XP very slow
Thanks for the help.....I'm going to pluck up courage for an XP reload and maybe upgrade the memory.
-
OK, good luck - let us know how you get on 
-
Preparing to reload XP, just taking one more look around as every pgm was taking an age
to open up.
I shut everything down...waited a minute or two then opened up task manager.
On the performance page, the CPU usage contantly moved up/down, usually in the single digits range, but several times a minute it would peak up to the high 20s%, then drop back down again.
Again, the PC was doing 'nothing' except running that task manager screen.
Also...anything signficant about a "Page file" of 180+Mb ? Seems like a large file, whatever it is - could that have anything to do with everything running slowly ?
Last hope before reload !
-
The pagefile is your virtual memory, some temporary space that Windows makes on your hard disk. When you have data in memory (RAM) that you haven't used for a little while, it moves it into the (fairly slow) virtual memory space on your hard disk so that it can free up some more (very fast) RAM for any new files or programs that you want to open. It does this so that the files and programs that you are using most frequently are in the fastest memory area, i.e. the RAM. A 180Mb pagefile is, therefore, nothing to be concerned about and it isn't having a negative effect on performance.
If you want to identify what it is that is using the few percent of the processor (CPU) time, you can check the Processes tab in Task Manager. One of the columns shows you how much memory each of the running processes is using and one of the other columns shows you the amount of processor time that each process is being allocated. The 'system idle' process typically uses 99% of the CPU time slots but anything else that is still keeping busy after you've shut everything down might possibly highlight an issue to be looked into further. Probably not though!
Junior Member
